Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Lulu

Artist: Daniel Rios Rodriguez

Venue: Lulu, Mexico City

Date: September 23 – November 20, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Lulu, Mexico City

Lulu is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the San Antonio-based painter Daniel Rios Rodriguez.

Known for his small, highly detailed and thickly impastoed approach to picture making, Rios Rodriguez depicts memento mori, still lives, landscapes and autobiographical scenes. Often including found elements, such as rocks, shells and feathers, which he incorporates into his densely textured surfaces, he builds frames for his paintings with materials such as wood and rope, which become part of the work itself. His intimately-scaled and unconventional paintings have been compared to the collages of Picasso, Paul Klee, Merlin James, the early work of Jean Dubuffet, and perhaps most significantly, the Texas-born painter and eccentric Forrest Bess, while nevertheless being notoriously unplaceable.

For his exhibition at Lulu, the artist will present a new suite of his singular and idiosyncratic paintings. Strongly representative of his unique mode of making, the new works demonstrate virtuosic color combinations while continuing to integrate mundane and unexpected materials, like burned match sticks, wheat, rocks, charred wood chips, so on and so forth. As such, by weaving together the aesthetic of, say, the thrift store and arts and crafts with a history of art that includes everything from Impressionism to the assemblage techniques of the ‘50s as well as the above mentioned painters, these works directly speak to the artist’s ongoing adherence to the minor and the marginal as a serious and committed position in contemporary art.

Daniel Rios Rodriguez (Born in Killeen, TX, 1978) received his MFA from Yale in 2007. He lives and works in San Antonio. A selection of recent solo exhibitions includes (2016) Western Exhibitions, Chicago; (2015) Artists Looking at Art, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio. Recent group exhibitions include (2016) The Faraway Inside, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY; A Change of Heart, Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles (2015) And There Is An End, James Harris Gallery, Seattle; Figuratively, Wilkinson Gallery, London; And There Is An End, Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Los Angeles. In 2017, he will have a solo at Nicelle Beauchene, NYC.

Lulu is an independent, Mexico City-based project space founded and run by the artist Martin Soto Climent and the independent curator Chris Sharp.